Page 10 of Flesh and Bone

Marshall’s revolver was in the hand that wasn’t holding onto Everett. The gun was raised, safety cocked, but Marshall didn’t pull the trigger. His hand shook, the revolver’s nose wavering between the beast’s snarling head and Everett’s face. He couldn’t do it, Everett realized, any more than Everett could have shot him in the same position.

Everett let go of his hand to fumble blindly for the gun. “Give it to me. You don’t have to do it, I won’t make you, it’s okay, I’ll do it myself—”

“Shut up,” Marshall retorted.

Everett fell back, hurt and confused.

“Shut up, I’ve got you. I owe you. Listen,” Marshall said frantically, dashing aside his tears. “Trust me. Close your eyes. Okay? Shut them. I got you.”

The beast on top of him snarled and gnashed its teeth, gusting hot, rotten breath in Marshall’s face. For a split second, Everett could see out of the beast’s eyes instead of his own. The room was red, hazy at the edges like it was full of smoke, and Marshall was a pulsing shape made of tender meat and bones to gnaw. Everett flinched. The beast’s body closed around him, smothering him in matted, manky fur, choking him against the slide of wet muscle. Tendons wrapped him into the beast’s flesh like a spider wrapping its victim-fly in silk. They tied him to the beast’s bones where nerve paths zipped over him, overwriting his own body’s. His hand was the last to go, fingers stretching towards his friend, towards the gun, before they too were swallowed in a tangle of dense fur.

“Close your eyes,” he heard again, and he scrunched them shut tight, refusing to look out with the beast’s hungry red vision to see his friend as something to be mauled and devoured.

The revolver cracked.

Then there was nothing.

???

Marshall stared at themonster slumped on the cabin floor. The bullet had torn straight through its skull, a neat entry wound between its eyes and a gaping hole at the back of its head, spattering fur and bits of bone and brain out behind it. The bullet had shattered one of the window panes in its wake, disappearing into the night, leaving a monstrous corpse behind without the thing that killed it.

Weak-kneed and wobbly as a newborn calf, Marshall took a step towards the thing. It didn’t move. Not a twitch, not a breath. It was as lifeless as the one he’d killed outside earlier that night. Carefully, Marshall raised one foot to dig the toe of his boot into the thing’s ribs. It shifted under the pressure, but didn’t move on its own. Marshall’s fear was rapidly retreating to make room for the gaping hollow of loss. Hooking his boot under the monster, he turned it onto its side.

There was nothing underneath, no second body. Just a pool of sticky dark blood, thick with the pulp of flesh and viscera, slowly soaking into the wood. Everett had been fully subsumed by the beast before Marshall shot it.

He hooked a lasso around its neck and dragged it into the open air so the stench could dissipate. By lamplight, he sliced the thing open from sternum to groin, praying he wasn’t too late. Hope felt foreign and very far away. The carcass stank like rot and offal, but instead of intestines spooling into the dirt, a bare arm fell out from between the ribs to land palm-up against the ground. Marshall rocked back onto his heels, staring at it. Afraid to see the rest.

The fingers twitched.

Cursing, Marshall hurried to toss aside his knife and grasp Everett’s arm above the wrist, shoving at the heavy ribs to lift that hank of meat and bone out of the way. He pulled Everett out like a caesarean section, first with resistance, then all at once. Everett slipped from the monster’s innards into the mud, where he lay like a maggot hatched inside a carcass that had never seen the light of day. He trembled and twitched like a dog in a dream.

Marshall watched and waited, clinging tight to Everett’s hand, committing his friend’s face to memory in case whatever woke was something monstrous. With his other hand, he drew his Colt and held it ready. If his first shot hadn’t done what was needed, he couldn’t hesitate a second time.

???

Everett stirred, the effortdisproportionate to the resulting movement, like struggling to wake from sleep paralysis. Some horrible nightmare had him in its grasp, trying to eat him alive. But now, the waking world was in reach again.

Cool metal touched his forehead, the kiss of a gun, gently drawing across his skin to move his filthy strings of hair from out of his eyes. When he shifted, the touch abruptly withdrew. He tried to speak, but he couldn’t unclench his teeth. His voice came out a weak, strangled groan from between tight jaws.

His name, in Marshall’s voice. He clung to the sound like the end of a rope, using it to drag himself back to the surface like a rescue from a tar pit.

When Everett managed to open his eyes, his vision was glassy and disoriented. He looked around blindly, his pupils big andround, unreactive, left hand groping over the ground to orient himself. His right arm was gone below the elbow, the torn flesh and chewed-up bones left behind somewhere in the monster. Clumsily, he pushed himself to his knees.

A hand caught his, warm sweat meeting sticky viscera again, and he sharpened, looking around until he could find Marshall’s shape in the smog smothering his sight. There he was, broad shoulders curled forward as he knelt in the dirt, still holding his revolver in his other hand, the barrel ready to put itself to Everett’s temple at the slightest direction from its master. Everett stared at him, willing his image to clear, willing the cabin behind him to solidify into something real. His heart kicked, his breath hitched as his body tried to recalibrate after having been ripped apart and born again. He had been something else for a while, like there had been some parasite inside him that had sunk roots into his nervous system, into his very thoughts, insidious and all-consuming. He had been nurturing it for a long time, feeding it morsels of guilt and shame and self-loathing until there was nothing left of him, his whole body turned to rotten fertilizer in the hungry mouth of that monstrous thing.

He had assumed it would only eat him.

His vision cleared — not entirely, just enough to shove those blotchy catfish back to the peripheries — and Marshall solidified from an outline into a living, breathing man. Even if he looked wrecked, he was alive and whole, more so than Everett.

With a croak of Marshall’s name, Everett crawled into his lap, curling his half-arm around Marshall’s shoulders to bury his face in the man’s chest, breathing him in. Everett was warm, but nothot, the fever abated, the blood loss slowed. Marshall went still, Everett’s teeth too close to his throat for trust or comfort.

But Everett didn’t bite. That urge had been exorcised along with the fever. Like Marshall had shot its brain out.

“Don’t let me go,” Everett said over Marshall’s heart.

Carefully, Marshall raised his other hand to Everett’s back, mindful of his finger on the trigger. Everett shuddered against him, raising his face to meet Marshall’s searching gaze. He looked hesitant, cautious, still holding that gun without squeezing the trigger. He looked like he had that night when Everett had offered him half of what he wanted but kept the rest in reserve. Part hopeful, part resigned.

As slowly as Marshall had done, Everett put his hand to Marshall’s face, cupping one cheek. His vision still wasn’t quite right, like the monster had been in the process of taking his eyes for its own. Maybe his sight would come back as the rest of his body mended; maybe it was permanently damaged alongside his arm. His gaze held unsteadily on Marshall as Everett shifted closer, carefully leaning in until he could press their lips together, Marshall’s chapped and Everett’s bloody. Everett’s heart kicked as hard as a mule, as scared of a chaste kiss as he had been when that thing was killing him — more scared, because he knew he was going to survive this and keep going afterwards. Everett tasted like rust and iron and he smelled like a slaughterhouse, but Marshall held still against him, no withdrawal, no rejection. When Everett pulled back, what little blood was left in his body burned in his face. Marshall stared at him a moment, lips parted, words caught in his chest.

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